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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Jules Witcover
As President Obama tours the country calling on voters to demand that
When Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was asked other day when he would bring up Obama's American Jobs Act, his answer was: "We'll get to that." First, he said, the
Nothing better illustrated Obama's current image as weak and ineffective than the soft-spoken but iron-willed majority leader telling the president and the leader of their party to bug off.
"We understand that there's conversations going on about the president's jobs bill, which I support, I'm in agreement with," Reid said. "We'll get to that. But let's get some of these other things done that we have to get done first."
There could not have been, either, a better example of how Reid seems impervious to public opinion, and how his focus on legislative sausage-making in the
Why the Senate Democrats continue to put the cranky and charisma-disadvantaged Reid in the spotlight as their chief spokesman, and why they would tolerate such a conspicuous nose-thumbing to the president on his urgent campaign to put the country back to work, defies logic and good sense.
Technically, the legislative branch is coequal to the executive, and Obama has no constitutional power to tell the Senate Democrats which of their colleagues should be the majority leader. But the administration cries out for a
Even before this latest show of putting his own agenda before the president's political need, Reid has displayed an irritating contrariness of his own. While Obama is undergoing a character transplant by abandoning his Mr. Nice Guy persona in favor of getting tough with the Republicans, he needs to show his new self to Reid as well.
Perhaps the
But Reid's seemingly uncooperative approach is an open invitation to the
It's one thing for the
It's a political peril that his Democratic predecessor in the Oval Office, Bill Clinton, faced in 1995 when challenged by House Speaker Newt Gingrich over the federal budget. Taunted earlier about diminished clout, Clinton declared "the president is relevant here," and he subsequently called Gingrich's bluff over shutting the government down. Obama could use some such test of his relevancy, by demanding that Reid take up the jobs bill in the
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Obama's Relevance: American Jobs Act | Politics
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